


Bitch better have my money

by pumpernickel



Category: The Room (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-29 01:34:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5111462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pumpernickel/pseuds/pumpernickel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's rough out there on the city streets, but Mark—he does it all for love. For friendship. For football.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bitch better have my money

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chianine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chianine/gifts).



When Mark's precinct put him undercover, his sergeant minced no words about why: 

"Look, kid, we need someone dumb and pretty for this job. That's you."

"But why?" Mark had run a hand through his attractively disheveled hair and frowned. He knew when he frowned it made him look older, more serious—more like the patrol officer he was and not a kid fresh from a surfboard. "You know I've been working to get onto vice. Now you want me to do petty crimes?"

"Not just any petty crime, son." The sergeant scratched his beard. "We need you to investigate this man."

Mark blinked. "That's my neighbor. The weird Euro-trash dude."

"Exactly. He'll never suspect you."

"You think Johnny's been embezzling?" Mark's eyebrows flew up before he remembered that pose made him look like a square and settled them again. "From his employer?"

"We don't know anything but the bank's suspicious about the bookkeeping. Check it out and see what you can find."

Two weeks later, Mark reported back: Johnny wasn't embezzling; he was just really bad at counting. No, seriously—he sucked at counting. He also had clumsy, big fingers, and a habit of adding an extra digit to client paychecks. He also didn't seem to know how to use the numbers on a keypad. Or that you could actually hit "enter" and "return" to get to the next line of a document instead of just hitting space or the arrow key a bunch to get there. Honestly, Mark had lost brain cells on this job.

But that job, his first undercover, had not only led to more jobs and recognition from his team: it had set into motion a series of events in Mark's life that he couldn't erase (and lord how he wanted to). Johnny naturally got disciplined at work, which he hid from his girlfriend-fiancee-whatever they were. Lisa had begun to suspect something, so she started to talk to Mark about it because they were all friends now, or something. Johnny was just always sort of there now; he kept asking him to come over to his apartment to hang out, in increasingly familiar ways that Mark sort of thought could have been thinly veiled attempts to get him into bed, if he weren't so sure Johnny wasn't bisexual so much as just European.

He introduced Mark to his therapist, Peter, who turned out to be so normal that it started to weird Mark out until the day he offered Pete some weed and Peter lost his shit so spectacularly it was strangely comforting, in a way; oh, good, he thought while Peter was shrieking at him to just say no to that shit, man, just _say no_ ; everyone in his apartment building was still bizarre as fuck. 

Mark's newest assignment saw him taking a job as a contractor in order to get close to a local thief ring with ties to a corrupt union; the hours were long and sweaty, and Mark, who didn't know shit about contracting, was mostly just glad the other dudes accepted him when he showed up in an appropriately grease-stained wife beater. Fucking Lisa just sort of happened around then, partly because she kept wearing low-top tanks, and partly because he figured having an affair with his best friend's wife was kind of a sleazy contractor thing to do. Her mom came around sometimes, gave him the fish-eye because she could just tell they were fucking; but then again, pretty much everybody except Johnny could tell they were fucking, what with the way Lisa liked to make out with him in public.

Mark was starting to suspect he was shit at doing things undercover.

"Mark, you like to play football, aren't you?" The question came at a bad moment; Johnny had bumped into Mark as Mark was on his way out of Johnny's bedroom. Lisa was still inside, and was in fact still blasting that R&B song she liked to play during sex, and Mark was just tugging his shirt back on; but Johnny didn't seem to notice anything wrong. He usually left his door unlocked in some kind of zen Eurotrash defiance of urban life in San Francisco, so he must have assumed Mark was just hanging out in his bedroom like adult male friends in their thirties (fifties in Johnny's case) do. 

"Uh... sure, Johnny, I like football," Mark managed, thinking fast. 

"Good," Johnny said, beaming. "We play outside with my new friend, Chris-R."

"Did you just put a dash in his name?" Mark asked. "Verbally?"

"Look, you have to give people the freedom to self-identify, Mark, you know that, right? Ha," said Johnny. "Even if they are drug dealer."

"What? Johnny, are you sure this is a good idea?"

"It's okay, Denny introduce me to him the other day. He's real nice guy."

To his credit, Chris-R was a pretty cool guy. He liked Drake, could occasionally be found discussing Nietzsche in coffeeshops, and had once won a local poetry slam with a free verse about PETA. He was really into Twizzlers and kept a pack on him at all times. "Yo, you're cool man, have some," he told Mark, who dutifully had some.

Mark kind of assumed Johnny had mistaken Chris-R for some other drug-dealing Dash-R, until two nights later, when he answered his phone to a string of obscenities. "Listen, you motherfucking cocksucker, you bring me my bitch-ass money in the next fifteen minutes or I'm gonna dangle you by your balls off Coit Tower, you dickwipe," said the caller on the other end.

"Sorry?" Mark said. "Did... did you just say your  _bitch-ass money_?"

"Oh, hey," said Chris-R. "Is this Mark? Sorry, man, wrong number. Hey, how's it going? That alley football was some shit, right? We should do it again sometime. Gotta go, ring me later, bro! Tell Johnny I said 'o, hai,' you know what I'm sayin'? i got more Twizzlers for you, man, we're gonna hit that shit! Bye!"

"Uh," said Mark, but Chris-R had already rung off to pursue his bitch-ass money.

"So you're saying you got a lead on a petty dealer who works the Embarcadero?" Mark's precinct sergeant said the next morning. 

"Like, I dunno, Embarcadero, Telegraph Avenue? He gets around. Do you want me to follow it up or not?"

 "Jesus, I send you to investigate your neighbor for embezzlement and next thing you're into drugs? What kind of company do you keep?"

Mark did his best to look grave and not longsuffering. "I run with hard people, sir."

"O, hai, Mark," said Johnny later that afternoon. "I was just telling Peter he should meet Chris-R so we can form a Bay to Breakers team, you think so, right?"

"I really don't think Peter and Chris-R should meet, Johnny," said Mark.

"But we are being good neighbors and friends, right?" said Johnny. "You're my best friend, and Peter, we are also best friends, we would never do anything to hurt one another, right?"

Mark looked earnestly back at Johnny and ignored the way Peter was doing his best to look at Mark like he was a character on _The Office_ and Mark was the camera. "No, Johnny," he said, definitely not thinking about how Lisa had insisted on getting him into a headlock using only her thighs the night before, just to prove to him—unnecessarily, really—that she had successfully tried out for the all-boy rugby team in high school. "None of us would ever do anyone, I mean anything, to hurt one another."

"That's why Chris-R will like you all! Let's go on road trip!" said Johnny. 

"So," said Peter to Chris-R awkwardly the next day as they all awkwardly crammed into Mark's pickup. "I hear you... like licorice."

"Yeah, man, but I only share with people I really trust," said Chris-R. "You want some weed instead?"

"...So then Peter freaked out and tried to call the cops, so the three of us had to wrestle him to the ground and take him back to his place before he hurt someone," Mark explained to the sergeant. "We made pretty good time carrying him but it kinda put a damper on the whole bonding thing."

"So you didn't get any info for me? Nothing about who this 'R's' clients are? No info on where his operations base is?"

"No, sir, but, well..."

"Yes?"

"I think he might be dealing from our roof."

"The roof."

"Yeah, I think I heard him up there threatening someone the other day."

"The roof of your apartment," the sergeant repeated. "And you're just now thinking to mention this to me?"

"It was just a hunch, I mean, we got people up there all the time. The door seems to always be open. Plus, it... kinda slipped my mind after we played football."

The sergeant sighed. 

"Well son," he said, "I hope you get the rent in that place cheap, because you're fired."

And that was that.

It was a good thing he still had that greasy wife-beater, Mark thought as he headed back to his fake contracting job. He'd heard contracting paid well, and now it was time to find out for real.

And he'd make sure to take his paycheck directly to Johnny's window at the bank.


End file.
